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Oregon Men Basketball

HOOP MEMORIES

The last living Tall Firs starter recalls that championship season

You can glimpse the toughness that made John Dick an all-American basketball player at the University of Oregon he was described, back in the day, as “rugged” from this anecdote.

In late October, shortly before his 90th birthday, Dick tripped over a rug in the kitchen of his Eugene home and fell.

He was carrying a plate of bacon and eggs, about to have breakfast before driving himself to Portland for an appointment, and he had the athleticism to set the plate down on a counter, while falling, without spilling a morsel.

He suffered no broken bones and didn’t lose consciousness.

“I hit several places on my head and parts of my body and bruised myself up pretty well and wound up on the floor,” the retired U.S. Navy rear admiral said. “I really came down with a crash. ...

“I had a few bloody places on me, but I’ve had far worse playing ball, by far.”

Thing of it was, Dick’s legs decided to take a timeout, so he couldn’t get back on his feet. He’d pull himself up on the counter and get to a certain point, then sink back down, again and again.

He did this, he said, for about 90 minutes.

“I’m a stubborn old goat,” he said.

He squirmed along the floor to a phone, called for help and spent a night in the hospital because nobody “seemed to want to take my word for it that I was feeling fine.”

Fine enough to continue attending basketball games at McArthur Court, where he crams his long legs behind the seat in front. Fine enough that he’ll be among the honorary shovel-wielders when Oregon formally breaks ground on the Matthew Knight Arena next weekend and, yes, he believes it’s time to replace Mac Court.

John Dick, dignified and discerning, is the last living starter from the Oregon team that won the first NCAA basketball title in 1939, defeating Ohio State, 46-33, in Evanston, Ill., for the first national team championship in UO history.

Center Urgel “Slim” Winter­mute was listed at 6-foot-8 and described as “the tallest hoopster on the coast.” Forward Laddie Gale, who had set the Northern Division scoring record the previous season, was listed at 6-4, as was Dick, who emerged as a starter in the PCC season, the only junior with four seniors.

In fact, Dick said, Wintermute, who was self-conscious about his height, and Gale were no doubt taller than listed, by at least an inch, if not more.

Under Hobson, the Webfoots combined height with a disciplined fast break, based on short, crisp passes, and with changing defenses, from man-to-man to a matchup zone. All were considered cutting-edge, Dick said. So was Hobson’s extensive stat-keeping that made Oregon better-prepared than most opponents.

The key to Oregon’s style of “galloping basketball,” as Gregory put it, was point guard Bobby Anet, 5-8, the team captain who was a coach on the floor, because in that era, coaches were not allowed to signal plays or call timeouts.

In Dick’s view, Anet needs to be remembered with the best point guards in UO history, Luke Ridnour, Terrell Brandon and Ronnie Lee.

“The greatest dribbler I have ever seen,” Dick said. “Bobby was a real smart kid, but also a real tough kid. He had short legs, but long arms, and he didn’t have to bend over to dribble, and he could dribble as fast as he could run.

“And he dribbled so low that I never saw anybody steal the ball from him. ...

“He was not a big scorer himself, but when you needed it, he was what you called a money player. He’d find a way to get the ball in the hole.”

Anet was from Astoria, as was the other starting guard, Wally Johansen. Virtually the entire team consisted of Oregonians, including the other starters Gale from Oakridge, Wintermute from Portland (though he’d grown up in Longview, Wash.) and Dick from The Dalles. They were fraternity brothers, in a couple of houses, and brothers in a larger sense.

“Oh, very much so,” Dick said. “I thought that was our strength. Of all of the team sports, basketball is the epitomé, from a team standpoint. We were very close on the floor, and we were very close off the floor. We were best friends.”

The road to Evanston

Early in the 1938-39 season, Hobson took the Webfoots to the East Coast for a swing of nine games, an unprecedented trip for Oregon that included an appearance in Madison Square Garden. The Ducks played in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Peoria, Chicago, Des Moines and, on the way home, against Stanford in San Francisco.

The trip, which had UO officials concerned about costs, produced a $4,400 profit. For the players, the experience was immeasurable; few had been farther east than Montana. On trains they ate in dining cars, with real silverware, fine china, crystal goblets and linen table cloths. They wore coats, ties and hats, broad-brimmed fedoras, and saw big cities.

They also learned about East Coast and Midwest officiating not insignificant, in a pretelevision era, when rules interpretations and styles of play varied from region to region and the modifications to sleeping cars needed to accommodate Wintermute’s long legs. Both would serve the Ducks well at the end of the season.

The Webfoots went 6-3 on the trip and returned a battle-­tested team. They split the first two games of the PCC season, and then Dick, who had been the first reserve at the center and forward positions, was installed as a starter for his defense and rebounding. From that point, Oregon went 18-1.

Oregon won the Northern Division title again, clinching the crown on the last weekend of the regular season with a hard-fought win at Washington, where 10,000 fans jammed the arena and Wintermute pulled down 31 rebounds.

The Webfoots then faced California, the Southern Division champion, in a best-of-three playoff series for the PCC title in Mac Court, winning 54-49 and 53-47 on March 16-17. In the latter game, Dick scored 16, to match Wintermute for game-high honors and begin a personal scoring surge that would continue through the NCAA title game.

“John Dick turned out to be a scoring genius against the Bears,” one account said. But Dick said he benefited from teams focusing their defenses on Gale and Wintermute.

Those would turn out to be Oregon’s toughest postseason games. The Webfoots took the train to the Bay Area for the NCAA West Regionals at Treasure Island, where they defeated Texas, 56-41, on March 20 and Oklahoma, 55-37, on March 21.

Oregon had won four games against national-caliber opponents in six days, interspersed with the 17-hour overnight train ride from Eugene to Oakland. Dick joined Winter­mute and Gale on the all-regional team.

The team headed to the Midwest for the title game at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. The steam engine trip took three days and three nights, the Webfoots reaching Chicago on a Saturday afternoon. They hadn’t practiced since before the Cal games, but their scheduled Sunday practice turned into a press conference.

The title game was Monday night, March 27. Ohio State was rested and ready, and would play on a familiar floor, with Big Ten officials. Never­theless, the Webfoots were confident.

“We never had a doubt in our minds that we were going to win it,” Dick said. “We didn’t care about their players, really. We just figured we were going to play our game, and they weren’t going to be able to stay with us.”

The title game had been founded by the National Association of Basketball Coaches. Among the 5,000 in attendance was James Naismith, who in 1891 had nailed a peach basket to a gymnasium wall, inventing the sport.

The Webfoots never trailed. They led 21-13 at halftime, and when Ohio State closed to 21-20, Oregon scored eight straight points to break the game open. Oregon’s defense had the Buckeyes befuddled, especially when the Webfoots made their man-to-man defense look like a zone by playing with their hands held high.

Dick led all scorers with 13 points; Anet, who had averaged just over five points in Oregon’s previous 33 contests, was truly a money player on this night, scoring 10 points.

As one account put it: “Peppery little Bobby Anet scored 10, but his shooting was less troublesome than his alertness and great dribbling. Time after time he broke up Ohio plays and raced down the floor to set up a field goal for a teammate. ...

“Oregon was surprisingly fast for such a big team.”

The little point guard left an indelible mark on the game in another way; leaping out of bounds to save a loose ball, Anet sent the championship trophy crashing from a table and onto the floor. The impact broke a figurine of a basketball player from the top of the trophy, and when Anet later held that trophy in triumph, he had to hold the statuette in place. It would be 45 years before then-UO archivist Keith Richard had the statuette welded back in place by the UO fine arts department.

Oregon finished the season 29-5, averaging 49.5 points per game to 38.3 for opponents.

Stopping the train

To the team, Dick said, “the victory was big. It was huge.”

And it was back home, too, where an entire state seemed to wait for the team’s return.

“Eugene doused its head in cold water Tuesday morning and came back for more a national basketball championship comes but once in a lifetime,” Dick Strite wrote in The Register-Guard.

Another published account noted that “students in Eugene went stark raving mad” in celebration. “Two police officers, attempting to straighten out traffic snarls on the campus, were whisked away from their duties on the shoulders of students and almost took a ducking in the millrace, but ended up dancing with sorority girls in one of the fraternities.”

On the City of Portland train, a modern “streamliner” pulled by a diesel-powered engine, the Webfoots headed West from Chicago.

They reached The Dalles shortly before 6 a.m., and because of community pressure the president of Union Pacific was informed that townspeople would barricade the tracks the train made an unscheduled stop, so the citizens could present Dick with a gold watch.

It was the finest in town, a Hamilton costing $75, financed by 25-cent contributions from 300 townspeople.

In Eugene, four days after their victory, the Webfoots were greeted by a throng.

“Never before in the 87 years of its existence has Eugene seen the like of the milling mobs that gathered at the S.P. depot and lined the parade route ‘humanity deep’ to get a glimpse of the champs,” Strite wrote.

“When Hobson and his Webfoots wearily pushed their way off the southbound Southern Pacific Limited, the pent-up frenzied shouts of 10,000 voices mingled with the clash of the University of Oregon band playing ‘Mighty Oregon’ and booming fireworks heralding the greatest athletic team in Oregon history.”

By vote of the student body, the numbers of the starters were retired, including Dick’s No. 18; the jerseys are in the UO archives, along with a film of the game.

(Dick had worn No. 8 as a freshman and sophomore, but added the first digit when officiating rules at the time required double digits. The other retired numbers from that team are Anet’s 20, Winter­mute’s 22, Gale’s 28 and Johansen’s 32. Over the years, the Ducks have not been consistent in keeping those numbers retired, however.

The next season, Oregon raised ticket prices to 85 cents for a reserved seat. Without the departed seniors, Oregon went 19-12 overall, 10-6 in the PCC. Dick, student body president during his senior year as well as team captain, led the Northern Division in scoring and followed Gale, Anet and Wintermute as an all-­American.

By then, World War II had begun. After a year in law school, Dick was playing AAU basketball in Seattle when Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. He enlisted in the Navy the next day, went through flight training, became an instructor and flew in combat as a fighter pilot in 1945.

By the time World War II ended, Dick was pursuing a career in the Navy, one that would take him around the world, and through wars in Korea and Vietnam to the rank of rear admiral before his retirement in 1973, when he moved to Eugene.

His wife of 53 years, Fran, died in 1999.

They had reared four children, and now Dick has 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The Tall Firs have mostly passed away; the only other surviving member of that team is reserve guard Ford Mullen, who lives in Stanwood, Wash., and celebrates his 92nd birthday on Feb. 9. One of two Oregon subs who played in the title game, Mullen later played a season of major league baseball.

Dick misses the old Webfoots, and certainly they shared something special. They were teammates, and they were friends, and 70 years ago, they were national champions.